Pride Programming

Celebrate Pride with Pacific Opera Victoria

Join us in celebrating queer voices and stories throughout the month of June through workshops, cabaret, watch parties, and more!

Fin’amor (songs from a former criminal) Workshop Presentation and Discussion

June 4 | 7:30PM

You are invited to be among the first to experience excerpts from, and reflections on, a moving new work by BC composer Jeffrey Ryan.

Join us for intimate evening of contemporary songs inspired by the medieval troubadour tradition and two significant 50th anniversaries in queer history:

  • the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the Canadian criminal code,
  • and the Stonewall Riots in New York.

Fin’amor (songs from a former criminal) is a collection of eight contemporary songs setting new queer-themed texts by James Fagan Tait for self-accompanying tenor (Bud Roach) and symphonie (an early form of hurdy-gurdy), reflecting the lived experiences of this creative team as gay men who came of age in those early years of a new queer reality, bursting with awareness and activism.

Like the songs of the medieval troubadours and trobairitz, these stories are rooted in love, relationships, and contemporary experience, now from a queer perspective.

Presentation begins at 7:30pm, followed by a discussion with the artists.

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Triple D Cabaret

June 12 | 7:30PM

Grab your glitter, fasten your wig, and join us for a night of stories so big they need to be sung, or lipsynced!

Featuring divas, divos, and drag, the Triple D Cabaret brings a showstopping lineup of bold performances to the Baumann Centre, designed to tug on your heart strings, tickle your funny bone, and shake up your senses from beginning to end.

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For A Look Or A Touch

June 15 -29

Manfred is dressed in a white shirt that is unbuttoned about halfway and an undone tie. He looks to the side with a look of anguish on his face. men standing behind him, dimly lit.For A Look Or A Touch is back from June 15 – 29! As a part of this limited time showing, VocalEye will be presenting the film with audio description on June 22!

An operatic film adaptation of Jake Heggie and Gene Scheer’s theatrical song cycle on what it meant to be a gay man during the Holocaust.

The opera features gritty instrumentation, elements of jazz and swing, and a score that captures the spirit of complicated relationships in catastrophic times.

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Medusa’s Children | A Watch Party in the Wingate Studio

June 18 | 7:30PM

Join us in watching this new opera film from OperaQ, a Toronto-based independent opera company dedicated to amplifying queer and trans voices, co-founded by Ryan Patrick McDonald, a member of our Civic Engagement Quartet, and Camille Rogers.

A new chamber opera with text by Charlie Petch (Mel Malarkey, Daughter of Geppetto, Why I Was Late) and music by Colin McMahon, Medusa’s Children explores themes of family, loss, sexual violence, and toxic masculinity through a trans and queer lens, drawing on the aftermath of the Medusa myth to tell a story at once dark, tender, and whimsical.

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Drag Storytime Online

June 26

Glamorous and bold, this is a storytime told with the flair of a poof skirt and the sparkle of a sequin dress.

Tune in as Drag Queens Woofie and Tanya Smania read stories recommended by The Greater Victoria Public Library, giving children positive queer role models and showing them that it’s beautiful to be themselves, whomever that may be. Watch on our Youtube, Facebook, or Instagram.

Enjoy this list of additional books recommended by the Greater Victoria Public Library perfect for Drag Storytime!